iOS vs Android and the impact on enterprise software

August 24, 2016

Jan Daw­son wrote an inter­est­ing analy­sis of Android ver­sion adop­tion trends that’s worth read­ing. There’s a small com­par­i­son to iOS I’d like you to pay atten­tion to. In short, Android updates top out at about 40% of the base some­where about 18 months after release — six months after the next release is avail­able. iOS updates hit about 90% adop­tion with­in the first year. Go ahead, read it, then come back.

Some­thing struck me as I read this in rela­tion to enter­prise soft­ware. Took me a while to put my fin­ger on it. It’s impor­tant though because I think it gives us insight into the sea-change that’s hap­pen­ing in tech­nol­o­gy; the change that I describe as a prob­lem of scale.

The pace of change vs our ability to absorb new technology

At an ear­li­er mid­dle­ware com­pa­ny in my career, I talked to cus­tomers about their abil­i­ty to absorb new releas­es. Gen­er­al­ly speak­ing, they could absorb a new release every year or so. That’s count­ing from the time of first start­ing to learn about the new release and eval­u­ate it, to nego­ti­at­ing terms, to new devel­op­ment, test­ing, and release sched­ul­ing.

It’s a long process, but one that informed our own release sched­ule objec­tives. If we had a new release as “quick­ly” as once a year, the teams respon­si­ble for our soft­ware would spend their whole lives man­ag­ing upgrades. Talk about an expen­sive invest­ment just to keep the lights on.

Not every piece of soft­ware is as com­pli­cat­ed or has as many depen­den­cies as mid­dle­ware. So per­haps mid­dle­ware is the excep­tion, not the rule. But this:

Now look at the dif­fer­ence in adop­tion of new mobile OSes high­light­ed in Jan’s arti­cle. The lat­est Android release is expect­ed to peak at about 40% pen­e­tra­tion, some six months AFTER the next release. Com­pare that to iOS which sees some 90%+ adop­tion with­in the first year.

It’s no won­der that iOS users (more impor­tant­ly, their expec­ta­tions and behav­iors) are stress­ing IT orga­ni­za­tions. So much of the base has access to new fea­tures and they want the soft­ware they use to take advan­tage of them. From screen size opti­miza­tion, to touch­ID, to sharesheets, and so on. These are the same IT orga­ni­za­tions that think it’s OK to still run Win­dows XP in places.

But IT isn’t used to mov­ing that quick­ly. And in fact, in many cas­es can’t with­out sig­nif­i­cant orga­ni­za­tion­al and cul­tur­al change.

The future is going to require even more scale

Does this mean mobile will “break” IT?

What about IoT?

What­ev­er IoT means, it’s going to mean even more soft­ware than mobile because like mobile:PC, IoT:mobile rep­re­sents an order of mag­ni­tude change in the num­ber of com­put­ing devices IT has to accom­mo­date. As a result of that order of mag­ni­tude change, there will be a lot more soft­ware expe­ri­ences required. Even more soft­ware than required by the shift to mobile, which I believe IT isn’t man­ag­ing so well.

An alternate point of view

Of course, there’s an alter­nate stat that’s worth con­sid­er­ing:

Maybe I’m wrong? Maybe not every­one wants to move as quick­ly as the ear­ly adopters?

It’s worth con­sid­er­ing, but… I think we can inter­pret this dif­fer­ent­ly. It might be true that peo­ple are over­whelmed by all the tech­nol­o­gy in their lives.

How­ev­er, every­one adopts some­thing new that they use as a bench­mark for what IT needs to deliv­er. I might use mul­ti­ple devices and enjoy screen size opti­miza­tion while my wife my enjoys the con­ve­nience of Touch­ID. In aggre­gate, IT needs to adopt both, even though each of us uses new fea­tures at a slow­er pace.

A problem of scale exaggerated by richer personas and new platforms

With the size of the mar­ket, and breadth of the way tech­nol­o­gy is infused into our lives, I think IT is in aggre­gate going to need to move at a scale greater than then any­one thinks pos­si­ble. Even if we con­sid­er that indi­vid­u­als are not adopt­ing the full spec­trum of new capa­bil­i­ties with each release.

This makes per­fect sense when we think about per­sona devel­op­ment. With all the data we have, persona’s can be more indi­vid­u­al­ized. Rich­er. More nuanced. And that means more con­sid­er­a­tion of indi­vid­u­al­ized fea­tures that may be rel­e­vant to each per­sona.

It also makes sense when we con­sid­er that the plat­form informs the expe­ri­ence (and dig­i­tal trans­for­ma­tion is about trans­form­ing from access to expe­ri­ence). Each plat­form (phone, tablet, watch, TV, car) is going to require spe­cial­ized devel­op­ment to cap­ture the spe­cif­ic ben­e­fits of the plat­form (watch: noti­fi­ca­tions, tablet: larg­er screen sizes, TV: fam­i­ly inter­ac­tions, etc).

Creating a software factory with our values embedded in the platform

Com­pa­nies move this slow because of con­trol. They have to con­trol every­thing to make sure they guar­an­tees secu­ri­ty, pri­va­cy, qual­i­ty, and gov­er­nance. The thing is, to ensure those val­ues, they con­trol the whole end-to-end devel­op­ment process.

In the future, IT is going to have to fig­ure out how to have more nuanced con­trol. IT will retain con­trol over their crit­i­cal val­ues, but not over the end-to-end devel­op­ment process.

In conclusion

Coin­ci­den­tal­ly to read­ing Jan’s arti­cle this morn­ing, I saw ‘trapped in a sys­tem’ by Fred Wil­son. It’s anoth­er great way to describe what we’re expe­ri­enc­ing in tech­nol­o­gy deliv­ered by large enter­prise com­pa­nies. Indi­vid­ual behav­ior is reflect­ing real­i­ty, but our behav­ior as a group reflects our own habits and inter­ests.

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David

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